1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to an image identification method, an electronic device and a computer program product, and more particularly to an image identification method, an electronic device and a computer program product, in which determination is made according to texture and color attributes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the popularity of the Internet, the search engine which enables the user to quickly find needed information is getting more and more important. Most search engines only provide text search function which searches relevant articles in the Internet according to the words inputted by the user.
Nowadays, digital images occupy a considerable percentage of Internet information such as shopping websites, news websites, or product introduction. There is an increasing demand for image search function in addition to the conventional text search function. The image search function searches relevant articles in the Internet according to the content of image.
Although some search engines provide image search function, the technology used for search images is still based on text search. That is, the user must firstly input key words. Then, relevant images are searched according to the texts. Such approach does not really search images in the database or the Internet but provides metadata for each image. Through the metadata, descriptions or key words are provided with respect to the content of each image. Then, when the user wishes to search an image, the search engine will search the images according to the text content of the metadata.
In other words, the pre-requisite for image search using metadata is that the interpretation process must be performed on contents of image database to obtain the metadata used as a determination basis for image search.
If the user wishes to use the images on hand as a search basis to obtain corresponding images through a search engine, the conventional image search method based on the metadata cannot be used for searching images.
Therefore, it is essential to provide a search method capable of directly searching similar images from the image database.